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Motoring presenter Jeremy Clarkson is working on a new show for Amazon Prime, eagerly awaited by his many fans. He's also being sued by the BBC producer he punched earlier this year.The blow Clarkson struck in March led the BBC not to renew his Top Gear contract. Radio 2 DJ Chris Evans will take over the BBC show, while Clarkson works for his new online employer.So what do we know so far about Clarkson's new TV show?The presenters will be the same Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond will provide their signature banter as a trio for the new show...

Not only are cars becoming more safe, feature-rich and efficient, but engines have never had more output, whether it’s an econobox Hyundai Sonata churning out a torque curve that would literally twist the swiss-cheese frame of a Mk. I Golf GTI, or the more insane Dodge Charger Hellcat, with its ticket-to-the-pearly-gates 707 HP supercharged V8. *** However, as with anything in the known universe, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, no matter what ‘80s John Travolta will tell you. With legislation putting forth mandates for increased complexity in cars over the last three decades, automobiles have become, on...

Auto sales in the U.S. for September came in at their highest monthly level since 2005 according to Autodata, displaying strength in a major consumer category. Yet according to new survey, the rise in popularity of ride-sharing app Uber is already having a significant impact on customer attitudes towards the purchase of new cars. The survey, conducted by research-based consulting firm Magid Advisors and shared exclusively with CNBC, found that among 2,400 respondents, Uber usage has grown from 4 percent in 2014 to 17 percent in 2015. The car sharing service was the third most commonly used "new company" on...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and California officials say some 482,000 Volkswagen and Audi diesels were engineered to falsify their emissions for federal tests—a violation that opens the German automaker to a theoretical fine totaling $18 billion. The EPA and California Air Resources Board say the affected models had software in its computer engine controls that could sense exactly when it was being tested for emissions quality. At all other times, it would run the diesels in a different mode with illegal levels of pollution; for example, spewing up to 40 times more nitrogen oxide, a key component of smog,...

Some of the world’s biggest automakers should have recalled millions of vehicles with keyless ignitions because the cars, which don’t shut off automatically if the driver fails to press the start/stop button, could be a deadly carbon monoxide risk, according to a new lawsuit. According to the suit, filed in Los Angeles Federal Court on behalf of keyless car drivers Wednesday, there have been at least 13 deaths -- and a number of close calls -- from carbon monoxide poisoning after consumers failed to manually shut off their engines. The suit claims, “Reasonable drivers mistakenly believe that removing the Keyless...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) A California automotive start-up is hoping their prototype supercar will redefine car manufacturing. The sleek race car dubbed 'Blade' didn't come off an assembly line - but out of a 3D printer. Kevin Czinger of Divergent Microfactories has spent most of his career in the automotive industry. One day he realized that no matter how fuel-efficient or how few tailpipe emissions the modern car has, the business of car manufacturing is destroying the environment. "3D printing of metal radically changes that. By looking at 3D printing not for that overall structure but to create individual modular structures that can...

Take notice if you drive to and from work each day in California. SB 350, known as the California Gas Restriction Act of 2015, (de León) requires a 50% reduction in petroleum, 50% increase in renewables for electricity generation, and a 50% increase in the energy efficiency of buildings by 2030. SB 350 will also grant the Air Resources Board significant authority to adopt regulations that will result in a 50% reduction in petroleum use in cars and trucks by 2030. In short, unelected regulators will be able to limit how far you can drive, ration gas, increase costs, and...

Hackers took control of a car and crashed it into a ditch by remotely breaking into its systems from 10 miles away whilst sitting on their sofa. In the first such breach of its kind security experts cut out the engine and applied the brakes on the Jeep Cherokee, sending it into a spin. The US hackers said they used just a laptop and mobile phone to access the Jeep’s on-board systems via its wireless Internet connection. They claim that more than 470,000 cars made by Fiat Chrysler could be at risk of being attacked by similar means - including...

*If you’ve never heard of ride-sharing, app-based taxi services like Uber and Lyft, you probably don’t get out much. They are pretty much taking over the world. And John Zimmer, who co-founded Lyft, even goes as far as saying that in five years, most millennials won’t own a car. They will see no need for it. “You could actually start seeing the majority of millennials in the next five years or so saying there’s no reason I should get a car,” Zimmer told Mashable recently. “The car used to be the symbol of American freedom. Now it’s like …owning a...

We haven’t checked in on the state of affairs in the auto industry recently, but it may soon be back in the news in a big way. Ford is making noises about the fact that they are losing money on the smaller, high efficiency cars which they must produce to stay on top of the eco-minded consumer market, such as the Ford Focus. So what’s a business to do? One suggestion being floated is that they just give up on turning a profit in Detroit and head down south of the border. Ford Motor Co.’s decision to end production of...

It was a milestone month for FCA. For the first time ever, Chrysler has outsold Ford in US retail sales, reports Reuters. Retail sales refers to only cars sold directly to consumers, not counting sales of fleet vehicles to corporate customers. Including fleet sales, Ford moved 223,666 cars and Fiat Chrysler group sold 186,864. General Motors, meanwhile, saw sales slip slightly year over year and sold 265,825 cars. For the industry as a whole, it was another good month as car sales continue to go up. 2015 is expected to see even more growth in car sales, as the market...

3D printing production is just scratching the surface of the multi-trillion dollar global manufacturing industry. But its dominance is already inevitable.ï„¿ï„¿ This is because modern manufacturing, despite numerous technological and process advances over the last century, is still a very inefficient global system. TodayÂ’s world of mass production is based on one simple rule: the more things you make, the lower the cost of each of those things. We have literally pushed this equation to its extreme limits. This approach was dramatically accelerated by Henry Ford, arguably the most impactful character in the industrial revolution. For starters, Ford proved out...

The automobile industry has been relatively stagnant for the past several decades. While new car designs are released annually, and computer technology has advanced by leaps and bounds, the manufacturing processes and the effects that these processes have on our environment have remain relatively unchanged. Over the past decade or so, 3D printing has shown some promise in the manufacturing of automobiles, yet it has not quite lived up to its potential, at least according to Kevin Czinger, founder and CEO of a company called Divergent Microfactories (DM). Today, at the OÂ’Reilly Solid Conference in San Francisco, Kevin Czinger...

Electrek is reporting that Tesla has signed a lease for the former Solyndra manufacturing site just a few miles away from its assembly plant in Freemont, California. Its current production facility can build up to to 500,000 cars a year, but Elon Musk says Tesla will be building “millions” of cars by 2020. What will it do with the new space? In an e-mail to Business Journal, it said “901 Page, located conveniently down the road from the Tesla Factory, gives us the space to expand our manufacturing and build more engineering labs as we build up production.” There is...

Sweden's Volvo has chosen a site in South Carolina for a $500 million investment in its first U.S. plant, it said on Monday, targeting a bigger share of the increasingly competitive North American premium market. Work will begin this year on the factory in Berkeley County, with production due to start in 2018 and quickly reach 100,000 vehicles a year.

‘Finally, neural networks that actually work.” So reads the headline in Wired, and, really, haven’t we all been waiting? (Yes, we have, even if we do not know it.) The article concerns artificial-intelligence innovator Jeff Dean, who as an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota 25 years ago created a rudimentary “neural network” — a computer system sophisticated enough to learn — but was hobbled by the available computing power of the time. Now working at Google, he’s helping to create vastly powerful and subtle networks that recognize faces and spoken language. A few pages over, there’s a wonderful if...

Investigators have arrested a St. Louis- area truck driving school employee in the murder of an Illinois student who was found slain after posting his car for sale on Craigslist, reports CBS St. Louis. The body of 19-year-old Taylor Clark was found at the M.T.C. Truck Center in Hazelwood, Mo. Tuesday, about 400 feet from the red 2007 Nissan 350ZX he had posted for sale and 25 miles west of where he was last seen by his girlfriend Monday in Glen Carbon, Ill. gordon2.jpg Michael Gordon CBS ST. LOUIS Police say the employee, 24-year-old Michael Gordon, fatally shot the Southern...

Here’s another, more recent one: The thorium-turbine powered car. Heat energy from the thorium – a weakly radioactive element (named after the Norse god Thor) that is estimated to be 3-4 times more naturally abundant than uranium and which contains 20 million times the energy as an equivalent lump of coal – is used to generate steam, which is then used to power a small turbine, which provides the motive force. The beauty of the system is that – like a nuclear submarine – the fuel lasts almost forever. Well, longer than you will last, probably. How’s 100 years sound?...

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk thinks every car on the road today — and many more in the future — will eventually be outlawed. The reason? They require humans to drive. “In the distant future, [legislators] may outlaw driven cars because they’re too dangerous,” Musk told NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang at company’s annual developers conference Tuesday. ”You can’t have a person driving a two-ton death machine.”

Elio Motors today announced it has unveiled its new 0.9 liter, 3-cylinder engine prototype, completing one of the company's most important stages of development. With a goal of up to 84 MPG and a projected top speed of more than 100 MPH, the enclosed, three-wheeled Elio requires an engine with a unique blend of power and efficiency that simply doesn't exist on the market today. Elio Motors, which plans to sell the vehicle for $6,800 when it launches in the first half of 2016, turned to world-class engine developer IAV to create a new technology that would meet the company's...